Are Search Engines Really All That?

The answer to this questions is of course yes. Their level of success however certainly has diminished the power of other advertising mediums and also the true strength of other media platforms. In the old days, it was the Yellow Pages that received so much free publicity. Now the Search Engines are the beneficiary of all other media. TV & Radio use to trickle down to the Yellow Pages at a very high rate. Creative forms of advertising pushed millions upon millions of phone calls into the Yellow Page medium. The Yellow Pages use to be this big vault where end users ended up and the only place they had to turn was a telephone book and a number they could call first. Now the Yellow Pages are a gateway to Search Engines. The Yellow Pages once were a enormous vault at the end of the advertising food chain. The Yellow Pages have now become a conveyer belt that continues to stream information down the eco system towards the likes of all the major search engines. Search Engines now are the big vault.

In the old days…there were only a few vaults and they were the big Telco Phone books. Then a few independent vaults (Independent Yellow Pages) came about but that was it. They too thrived as a beneficiary from TV and Radio. There now are millions of little search engine vaults out in the world that continue to process impressions from TV, Radio, Newspaper, Yellow Pages, Mass Mail, Flyers, Magazines, Newsletters, Billboards, Word of Mouth, and the list goes on into infinity.

What I am trying to convey is that the search engines get more free publicity than any other form of media in the history of the world. Some companies deliver over 30 million phone books per state and while these same states also have 10 different phone book publications delivering millions of other books to different counties. Newspapers deliver millions upon millions of publications each year. TV & Radio broadcast reach hundreds of millions of users each day. When you add all this up, and add all with all forms of advertising together, Search Engines arrive at the end all of all roads of publicity. Would the Search Engines really be all that if these other media’s didn’t reference all the companies names and web addresses in their publications millions upon millions times a day? Does Google and Yahoo brand the other media’s for free? No.

The moral of this story is to not discount all the other forms of media. The Internet is truly one of the great inventions ever. Print publications, then radio, then television and now the Internet. Each were unfathomable technologies that changed the world. Neither are more important than the other. Yet they each still maintain important ingredients to each others evolution and popularity.

The Internet is all that because of the naive way that each of these media’s have pumped traffic towards Search Engine usage. Search Engines get billions upon billions of free impressions from the other media’s. In some cases their cumulative “media message” has pushed certain media’s upon extinction. In many cases they even helped do it to themselves.

The moral of my story is that I believe that these search engines prove that there are numerous forms of media that exist and maintain a enormous effectiveness in our society. These media’s are not to be taken for granted or discounted. Each remains dominant in their own way. The Internet now holds the key to the advertising vaults in this world. Sooner or later something will come along that will require a new lock and key and when this happens the Internet also will turnover the key of dominance. History has shown that it can re-lock any lock to the advertising vaults of this world. Search Engines will be all that for sometime…but eventually they too will have to exchange their dominance for what use to be.